- Staff
- #1
And talking lessons from X with community notes rather than biased fact-checkers.
Meta will get rid of fact checkers, "dramatically reduce the amount of censorship" and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would "get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X".
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta's "fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created".
The tech firm's content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas "where there is less concern about the bias of our teams", he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean "we're going to catch less bad stuff".
Meta has more than 3 billion users globally. In a wide-ranging statement, Zuckerberg said Meta would also "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse" and "work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more".
He cited Europe as a place with "an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative" and said: "Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down."
Zuckerberg, 40, framed the decision to get rid of fact checkers as a return to an argument in favour of freedom of expression that he made at Georgetown University in October 2019. He said November's US presidential election felt like "a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech".
Meta will get rid of fact checkers, "dramatically reduce the amount of censorship" and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would "get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X".
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta's "fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created".
The tech firm's content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas "where there is less concern about the bias of our teams", he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean "we're going to catch less bad stuff".
Meta has more than 3 billion users globally. In a wide-ranging statement, Zuckerberg said Meta would also "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse" and "work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more".
He cited Europe as a place with "an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative" and said: "Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down."
Zuckerberg, 40, framed the decision to get rid of fact checkers as a return to an argument in favour of freedom of expression that he made at Georgetown University in October 2019. He said November's US presidential election felt like "a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech".
